Panvamp's Digital Palace

RISE from your GRAVE!!

2012-05-07T14:41:00.002-04:00

So...

Back again. What? you mean my 1 follower is no longer reading this? Well, much has happened in the last few years. I say "last few years" but it is looking like its been much longer than that. So what has happened to old Panvamp since '08? Turns out that IBM laid me off in 2009. I am surprised that it took that long. For a company that has an ongoing reputation for laying people off, I managed to make it 14 years. So I bid "good day" to Big Blue in March of '09. (Interestingly enough, my father was laid off at just about the same time. He had over 30 years.)

Next up, some people know that I was having problems paying my then out-of-control mortgage. Well, it turns out that if you sign an agreement to lower your mortgage payments, they don't take it too kindly when you no longer have employment. So, in May of '09 we lost our house in Georgia. I even pawned all of my firearms. I sold computer stuff. I threw all kinds of things away. 2009 was not a particularly good year for me and my family. But I will tell you...

It probably was one of the best things to have happened to me.

One thing that people often don't think about the benefits of being laid off. "What?! Are you crazy?" you ask. No friends, there are most likely many benefits to being laid off (other than spending more time with your family). The big benefit to me was, in all honesty, I HATED that job. I detested getting up in the morning, going to that god-awful place, and doing that stupid mindless job, even if I was making great money. It felt like instead of being laid off, I was paroled.

I could have done without losing my house (I really loved that house). But see friends, even this was not all bad. More on that in a moment.

So what did I do? Did I sit and cry? Did I feel sorry for myself? A little. But after it passed, I hit the streets. We got a rental house thanks to a really nice guy named Craig who gave us a chance. I did get another job. In May of '09 I began working for a company called Cbeyond in Atlanta. I realized something happened when I was with IBM. My love of technology, of computers, of all things digital had faded. I began a new career as another new phone support agent, Tier 1.

And I LOVED it. I remembered why I got into this field to begin with. I picked up Cisco quickly, and all of the other products we offered I was able to build on my previous years of experience. I was now supporting internet, HME, web hosting, firewalls, backup systems, you name it. And I realized that I was fairly decent at Voice and VOIP products.

I was a Tier 1 contract agent until January of 2010. In January, I became a permanent Tier1. In February of the same year I was promoted to Tier 2 tech support (the single largest pay increase of my career to date). As luck would have it, in August, Cbeyond announced that they were opening a call center in Denver, Colorado. They needed a Tech support instructor. They offered to move the candidate and to give them a permanent job as Operations Training instructor.

I applied for and got the job.

We moved to Denver in August of 2010 and have been here ever since. We still rent our house, but we are rapidly approaching a time that I might be able to buy a nice one of my own again (even though renting is not that bad). I am still not rich, and money continues to be a struggle, but I am far better off than before where we could not even afford to keep the power on.

Take heed, friends. Life can be difficult. It's easy to lose a job or a house and feel that there is no way that things can get better. But they can. If you make things happen, they WILL COME. Learn from this post. Never give up. You can ALWAYS start digging out of that hole.

So I will be blogging more. I swear it. I am going to even delve into some telecom topics, as I have a new-found passion for voice and data technology. Let me share it with you.

2009-05-01T10:34:00.001-04:00

Well apparently I blogged too soon. OpenBSD has had a release to version 4.5. I wonder if FreeBSD is going to get a new release this month too?

Announcing NetBSD 5.0

2009-04-30T11:03:00.004-04:00

The Newest NetBSD has been released. This is pretty big news, they have been working on it for a long time. Its good to know that the SMP stuff is finished. NetBSD was one of the first OS's to support Multi core support, but I know they have been making it better and better. Says there are 7 million new lines of code. I usually use FreeBSD, that runs my server/firewall/router/gateway, but I have NetBSD on a backup server (a SPARC Ultra AXe).

The Big three BSD's all work great but they are mostly specialized. What are the Big Three?

Hmm. Maybe we should have a quick Tao of the BSD's.

FreeBSD - The Jack-of-all trades BSD Good for beginners, lots of supported hardware and the innovative ports system. Makes installing software as easy as typing "Make install clean" and walking away. I use this for my main server.

NetBSD - The main advantage of NetBSD is there is a release of NetBSD that runs on anything. I mean thin clients, phones, old single board computers, toasters you name it.

OpenBSD - This one is the BSD that is designed with security in mind. They went for years without having a single security hole in the default install. You would think that this would be best for a home server but it really has paranoia-level security.

If you are interested in Unix-like OS's check out the BSD's. Linux is probably more robust on the desktop, but the BSD's make GREAT servers.

Ok I joined Facebook

2009-04-30T02:53:00.002-04:00

FINE! FINE!

I joined Facebook. I know, I know, I said I'd never be a part of that... But, things change. I've been feeling kinda isolated and lonely lately. Maybe re-connecting with other friends would be good right now.

Anyways... I am gonna try to post something a day at least...

I am BOYCOTTING HP

2008-11-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

I'm boycotting all HP products. Right now. All of them. I'm certain you find yourself asking why. Hp has the reputation of making the worlds best laser and print systems. I suppose they make decent computers and, of course, gave us the robust HP-UX system. But the reason I am boycotting them is that product support, by and large, is abysmal.

I began running Windows XP-64 since 2004. I love it. Its just like xp but MORE stable in my opinion. Of course, I knew there would be driver issues in the beginning. And some of the issues I had with drivers were very bad, such as the drivers for the sound blaster audigy, which caused all sorts of lockups and reboots. But even that, as much as I HATE to give creative labs credit, was resolved in a later update. I was given an HP Laserjet 1012 printer for christmas the year before. I loved the way it printed. Really. Then I upgraded to XP-64. And of course, there was no driver for Windows XP-64. That was okay, I had thought. EVENTUALLY they would HAVE to come out with 64-bit printer drivers for this printer. I mean its HP -- how could they not support a recent Microsoft OS?

It is now November 10th, 2008. XP-64 has been out for FOUR YEARS and now there is Vista64. No driver. Not a beta driver, not a preliminary driver, nada. There was some crap on the driver site about how 64-bit windows would not be supported by HP. Their answer, I kid you not, was that you can use a driver for a completely different printer. Ok, I thought, that must be it. What they failed to mention, was when you use the wrong driver not everything works. In fact, every time I tried to print anything with ANY formatting at all, the printer would spit out sheets that say "Unknown PCL Mode". Thats no mapquest maps, no pdf's, and bearly any word documents. And when it did print, the borders were completely screwed up.

In an attempt to track down the answers to WHY my printer was acting that way, I was told that the 1010 series (including mine) were "host-mode" printers, and that they had incomplete PCL code in the printer. All of that is supposed to get formatted from the drivers. And since I was not using drivers designed for my printer, I was always going to have this problem. That means that HP's great printer solution of using other drivers has NO HOPE OF EVER working with my printer under XP-64. So I figured, its just temporary. EVENTUALLY HP will get the message and relase some sort of 64-bit driver.

I still look at the internet about this issue from time to time. I hooked up the printer to my BSD server using cups and Samba, and all of my 32 bit windows and Linux machines automatically install the driver and print GREAT. My 64-bit machine? Nothing. Oh and not only that? There is a generic windows postscript driver just for printing to cups machines. It works great on my XP laptop. But guess what??? It only has 32-bit drivers as well.

Still, no driver. So I got a bug in my brain to search the internet about my problem, like I have every now and then for the last 4 years. I happened to find this post here.

Not only did the person trying to answer the question give him the SAME answer that was given 4 years ago, he thought it was VISTA. The post clearly states XP-64. So it looks like HP support reps don't know the difference between XP-64 and Vista, they STILL HAVE NOT WRITTEN A 64bit driver. It has been 4 years. And HP, supposedly one of the most technologicaly advanced IT companies there is, is apparently INCAPABLE of writing a 64-bit driver for this printer. Its not like someone wanting a driver for BeOS or Solaris or something. Its Windows XP-64 by MICROSOFT. Its got a bigger install base than FreeBSD. And yet it appears that HP just can't be bothered at all. Oh you can sell me that old line "well it doesn't say that its compatible with 64-bit, so they have no obligation to make drivers for that platform." Give me a fucking break. I expected better of a company like HP. There are no Vista drivers for this printer either apparently, and HP has no plans on writing supported drivers for this entire line of printers.

So I suppose according to HP, I'm just supposed to throw this printer away. I know that it is a "valu line", meaning I didn't have to take out a mortgage to buy it. And because of that, I suppose, HP would love for me to just throw my printer away. But here is the BEST part. Almost NONE of their printers have xp-64 drivers. True they have some, but most of those are just half assed drivers just so Windows would see the printer forget having full functions. And Apparently, their beautiful answer to how to get these printers to "work" in Vista is to install a completely different driver, that is CLOSE to the actual printer. The same crappy answer all over.

I had to buy a usb IR port for some testing. I was worried when I bought it because it was cheap, obviously chinese, and it was difficult to actually identify the manufacturer. To its credit, I put the driver cd in and right there was an XP-64 driver. Fully supported. If Joe-bob-chin chinese company can write 64 bit drivers, I fully expect HP to be capable. But clearly they just don't care enough about their customers.

I work in support and If I were to give these answers to my customers, my job would become a complaint department VERY quickly. And my customers would not accept the "use the driver closest to your printer" crap for a second.

Hewlett-Packard, your lack of drivers and support for your products to be used in modern, 64-bit environments, is INEXCUSABLE. And from this moment forward I vow NEVER to purchase any HP products again. Ever. This is the last straw. You have had 4 years and you can't even support Vista 32, much less any of the 64-bit OS's. Perhaps if I bought a professional line printer from you, I wouldn't have this problem. But clearly you don't give a crap about the little guy who cannot afford a thousand dollar laser printer. My father bought a laptop from you on my reccomendation. No more. I will never reccomend any HP products to anyone ever again. I honestly hope you go bankrupt and lose every customer that you have. Oh I know I'm just one pissed off techie, but there are plenty more of me.

If you happen to be running Vista or XP-64 and you have a Laserjet 1012 printer. Give up now. No amount of searching the internet will EVER give you a work around that works completely. You might be satisfied with limited printer support but I am not.

Will they Listen? Probably not.

2008-09-08T13:37:00.003-04:00

I was just reading about Spore's recent crisis at Amazon.com. The much anticipated game was released to some fanfare. It seems however, that Spore implements the DRM scheme Securom. And take it from me, Securom causes more problems than it solves. I personally have had issues where Securom games refuse to work because I happened to be running the Daemon Tools virtual drive software.

For a game company to expect me to uninstall perfectly legitimate tools simply because those tools might be used for piracy, well let me just say that this is a slap in my face; an insult to my intelligence and my reputation. When I was first into computing, piracy was just as rampant as it is now, if not more so. First, there were "uncopyable disks" that could still be copied with the proper image software. The next reaction was to include a code wheel or code sheet, usually filled with esoteric symbols that correspond somewhere in the game. Usually red, or somehow otherwise protected from photocopying. This did not really work either, since code wheels could be taken apart, copied and reassembled, and you could get a copier to copy the red code sheets if the setting were just right. But the PC game market had a saving grace that both provided a means for them to produce more technically superior games AND reduce piracy. The CD-ROM. For about 6 years in the 90's, game manufacturers released many games on CD-ROM with absolutely no copy protection whatsoever.

The reason was, was that CD Burners were unheard of, and most hard drives were mostly no larger than 1GB. So copying a 600MB CD made little sense, and that is IF you could fit it on your hard drive. So at that point the only way to get a full game was to buy it. For a long time, copy protection was nowhere to be found. Then of course, came the advent of CD burners and the Internet. These two factors combined gave rise to a new era of piracy. So what did game makers do?

For a while, they did nothing. Burners were not that popular and most people accessed the internet through dial up and most people were unwilling to download entire cd images. But the threat had begun. Game manufacturers, taking a page from recent controversies from the RIAA about MP3 piracy, decided to implement DRM. They were just checks to see if the CD was in the drive, but it had begun. And so, with major piracy fears, game companies are more and more using the utterly draconian Securom protection. Never mind that it doesn't work on a large amount of computers for people who actually bought the title. So, more and more, users are turning to less-than-legitimate channels for these titles.

I had thought that computer software vendors would have learned a lesson long ago, a lesson that the RIAA is now just learning. There will always be pirates. The pirate has been an accepted stereotype in the computer industry since the early eighties. And these guys aren't going anywhere. Arrest them, confuse them, make everybody authenticate with thumbprints, they are going nowhere. This is the digital world now, and pirates are a fact of life. If you provide a digital product for sale, it will be acquired by a percentage of pirates. It is going to happen. Instead of trying to accuse every customer that buys your product of being a pirate, why don't you concentrate on the title. Make no mistake, you are calling every one of your customers a criminal, just like the RIAA. Oh you could be like them, track down a handful of pirates and sue them. Of course, this is futile as well, as there is no way you will catch even a fraction of the actual pirates, and you will just ruin a few dozen lives.

As if being treated like a criminal by default wasn't bad enough, the worst part is that the DRM functionality does not work on a growing number of systems. This is inexcusable, especially when the customer is being called a criminal even though he purchased the product. Now, the advantage of piracy is not only to make the game free, but for some people who bought the title, this is the only way for them to actually play it. And the activation part of securom? Three activations and then you have to call??? What happens if I feel nostalgic and want to load up Spore in 10 years? Are those activation servers still going to be functioning? I highly doubt it. Which means that your game will have a limited shelf life. As far as I'm concerned, the minute those activation servers are offline, every customer who purchased that product should get a refund. Because then it becomes impossible to install this title legitimately.

Software companies, I truly am sorry. Piracy is not going away. In my opinion using lesser draconian DRM measures like Safedisc is OK, but do what you can and then accept what happens afterword. If its a good game, it will sell. Sure some people will pirate it, but again, this has been going on for the last 20 years. One day, when these games requiring activation are forgotten because there are no more authentication servers, software companies will listen. But until then the gaming public seems to be speaking. Treat paying customers like they are criminals and they will, invariably become them. And you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Review of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files

2008-08-23T19:01:00.015-04:00

One of the things that I still do on a regular basis is read fiction. I love to read. I have loved to read since I could read. So many of my peers and colleagues have admitted to me that while they may code, or play video games, or work on their networks, almost none of them read.

Literacy, or as I like to say, “the art of reading”, is one of the best measures of both a person’s intelligence and wisdom. I know it carries a stigma of being geeky or nerdy or something that shut-ins do to pass time. But some of the best stories are still written in books. Some of the books have been mad into excellent movies, such as The Lord of the Rings. Some of them have been made into very bad films. But the romance of the printed word still retains a large majority of a tale’s impact, and in most cases popular media has ineptly failed to adapt said tale to modern media.

A few months ago, looking for something to read in the darker parts of literature, I stumbled upon a set of books by an author named Jim Butcher. I had never heard of him before, but the blurb on the back of some of his books, as well as the cover art, piqued my interest. So I picked up a copy of Storm Front, the first book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden files. I had some reservations. Modern horror novels all seem to look like they are about tragically-hip wanna-be vampire punks who are hopelessly tormented and crying and blah blah blah. Either they were copies of Anne Rice’s vampires or straight out of the World of Darkness. I was getting very sick of those horror novels.

Jim Butcher has totally breathed new life into the horror/occult literature arena with The Dresden Files. Needless to say, my expectations were totally wrong. While vampires ARE a part of the Dresden Files, Butcher’s take on them is very different. There are elements of the previous vampire ideas there, but Butcher manages to give them a different identity, making them his own unique creations. And they are not the only focus of his novels. Not by a long shot. The magic and wizardry of the novels combined with the brooding “White Council”, the demons, faeries, werewolves AND vampires create absolute page turning details in the whole of The Dresden Files.

There are, so far, 10 different Dresden Files works. I am going to try to write a review of the series and perhaps one or two lines about each book. I am going to try my damnedest not to give away any spoilers. But if I have convinced you already, hit up one of the links below and order yourself some of them. Those of you who need more convincing please, read on.

Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only professional “Wizard for Hire”. I sort of got the impression “what if Harry Potter grew up to become Sam Spade?” Your take may be different, but he is by far one of the most complex literary characters that I have read in the last five years and he is hard to place an exact analogue. He has an office, a dingy apartment and a car that barely runs. He wears a black leather duster, something I myself wear when weather permits (Though I have been wearing mine since the mid 1990’s). His clients are often boring, looking for lost items and the like, but the novels document some of Dresden’s more strange and dangerous clients. The stories are rife with magic, conjurings, thaumaturgy, and the supernatural. My skin crawled more than a few times.

Butcher seems to have either written these books with a male audience in mind, or at least an open-minded female audience. This is fantasy, bear that in mind. Every woman has huge boobs and most of the female characters seem to border on nymphomaniacs. But instead of feeling “cheap” or “sleazy”, the adult themes of these novels end up being very sexual, and very arousing. Sure it’s not reality, but this novel is “fiction”. And I’ll tell you, I loved every last minute of it. I WANT to read books where girls are literally tearing their clothes off all the time. Some scenes are the most erotic things that I have read in quite a few years. Make no mistake – these are not books for the majority of the Harry Potter crowd.

These novels are not just fear and sex either. The magical system that Jim Butcher has created for the Dresden Files is intricate and interesting. It combines many ideas of traditional magic, some fantasy elements and just a subtle hint of Hollywood flair. Harry Dresden has an array of spells and magical artifacts, including several spiritual items. This approach to magic is has the effect of feeling realistic, or at least as realistic as magic can be. There is a bit of religion in the novels as well, and Butcher handles this perfectly. He isn’t preachy, he doesn’t offend, and some of the most thought-provoking aspects of these novels pertains to Dresden’s view of the almighty and how it relates to others around him. The magic is also not overused. Dresden is not just some spell-slinging whitebeard that is powerless without his books. Far from that; Dresden has little hesitation to pull out his revolver when the need arises.

Butcher is also careful to include lots of humor as well. Downright funny events happen and there are small nuances that get the reader smiling every time, such as an army of unseen Faerie cleaning servants called brownies that Dresden cannot talk about or they will stop cleaning his apartment. There are also plenty of pop culture references, especially if you were a child of the 80’s as Dresden, Butcher and myself likely all are. (Though how Dresden was able to watch Star Trek TNG without a television is a mystery to me)

Harry Dresden is a fantastic character. Often broke, cursed by bad luck and bad women, he is easy to empathize with. He is a character that you want to root for. The other characters in the book are quite unique as well. Every person detailed in the books is interesting. Every enemy, every ally, and many of the creatures are all finely detailed. I’ve stated that the setting is Chicago, but that isn’t really true. With the Spirit world of the Nevernever, the jaunts to various night haunts and forgotten places, Butcher’s attention to detail doesn’t just create a story – he created a world. Some characters have hidden and mysterious lineages, others have ongoing personal challenges, yet others are members of secret societies like the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The story is rich indeed.

I am also amazed at Butcher’s talent for writing epic scenes and encounters. The climax of almost every book is a page-turner. Without giving too much away, one ending involves two magic users fighting in a house that becomes a giant, blazing, inferno, while trying to avoid being killed by summoned scorpions. The end of my favorite of the series, Death Masks, leads Dresden and company on a chase after a demon that spans the entire length of a moving train. Adrenaline filled, I read those pages at a blinding pace in an effort to reach the ending. Butcher also is unpredictable. Several times I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen, and of course, I was wrong. The writing is filled with creativity and style. If you have any imagination at all, you will love these books.

Now here is a list of the novels including a small mini review

Storm Front

This is the book that got me interested in the series. If you aren’t prepared, (I wasn’t) the beginning has lots of information, and the story heavily builds in the beginning of this one. You get introduced to things like the White Council and the Wardens, plus there is a lot of information about officer Murphy, Dresden’s sometime employer, sometime partner.

Fool Moon

Werewolves, werewolves everywhere. Great climax, begins building an interesting relationship with resident mobster Marcone.

Grave Peril

Introduces Michael Carpenter, God’s own Knight of the Cross. Without a doubt my favorite character aside from Dresden. Genuinely creepy starting with an exorcism in Chicago’s Cook County hospital’s Nursery ward.

Summer Night

My least favorite of the series. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good! Lots and lots of Faerie intrigue, culminating in a battle that shakes the heavens themselves.

Death Masks

Easily my favorite of the series. Michael Carpenter takes more of an active partnership with Dresden and brings in the other Knights of the cross. Introduces the Order of the Blackened Denarius. Best ending of the series.

Blood Rites

I’m afraid I can’t say anything about this one without spoiling the plot and the Thomas character. I enjoyed it immensely, however.

Dead Beat

A real mystery. Dresden tracks down a necromantic artifact in an attempt to stop an evil wizard from destroying the city. Only two words can sum up the awesome ending to this one: Zombie T-rex.

Proven Guilty

Molly Carpenter, daughter of Michel and Charity carpenter, becomes a mail character in this book. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but man, the whole Goth thing that Molly has going on. Dude. Hot. REAL HOT.

White Knight

This one starts with a mystery and ends with a bang. The mystery part was the best aspect of this novel. It really seemed to take Dresden back to his roots, so to speak.

Small Favor

In the first few pages of the book, Dresden gets into a fight with several large Goat creatures. And it just gets weirder from there. I loved the ending. Lots of guns, night raid, magical island. Almost felt like a James Bond ending.

Read these books. They are superb. I can’t wait for Turn Coat.

Panvamp's back! And talking about subnotebooks.

2008-08-22T19:28:00.004-04:00

Hello friends, Panvamp is back. Many of you are wondering what happened to me...

Alright. Lets be realistic. Not many people read my little snippet of geek heaven, so if you are reading this, you probably were not wondering what happened to me at all. As it stands I have 19 posts and ZERO comments. I was going to make up a whole lot of excuses as to why I haven't posted all that much. But that is one advantage of not having any readership at all: I don't have to explain myself.

So, on to today's topic is the newest, hottest, greatest trend in mobile computing - Subnotebooks .
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, most of you have probably noticed the recent trend of small, light and extremely portable notebooks popping up all over. With Asus's EEPC and of course the ubiquitous OLPC project, subnotebooks look like the next lucrative mobile market. Intel is dropping mega money on its new Atom processor. In your mind you can see armies of the ultra-hip carrying these subnotebooks in trendy bags over their shoulders, while riding their Segways, through vast, friendly, urban outdoor settings, each tipping their designer hat at each other.

In actuality, however, one wonders exactly what the heck these people are really going to do with these tiny masterpieces of mobile technology. I really think that subnotebook products that are marketed as "personal learning devices" to children (such as the aforementioned OLPC) are seriously underestimating the devastating effect that children have on technology. It isn't only OLPC, I saw an article about a similar machine here today. The author of this article clearly states "so it’s not up to Panasonic ToughBook levels of ruggedness, but it should be able to survive life in the hands of a primary school student." I'm betting that the author has never seen primary school students and technology mix, but believe me, it isn't pretty. And giving them a computer with an LCD in it? That ALSO has a rotating touchscreen? I'm willing to bet that they get roughly half of them back with cracked LCD's, and the other half swiveled so much that the screen breaks off. Heck, half of the adults that I know can't even handle their full size laptops without breaking them.

I think that on a marketing level, subnotebooks will never be more than a niche market. Many of the people that I know ( including my wife ) have said that they wish that they had a really portable machine that they can take anywhere, and just plop down and open up and start working. Of course, none of them even considered how FREAKING SMALL a 7 inch or 8 inch display is. Oh sure, its totally usable for reading documents and writing documents, playing some music or watching a video. However... my T-Mobile wing can do all of that and more. And with a GPS module, its a pocket GPS. Oh I know what you are saying, "well the cell phone screen is even smaller!" True. But alot of people are looking to use these as a desktop (or laptop) replacement. Use it for a little bit. Many of them only have a resolution of 800*600. Yeah, have fun surfing the web on that. Because most sites are going to look like HALF sites and you are going to be scrolling left, right, up, down... the thought of browsing the web like that makes me sick to my stomach. I can use my phone to browse the web if I have to, but it is always by necessity. It is not enjoyable at all. But for music, videos, even email I find myself using my phone far more.

Right there, I am not a good candidate for a subnotebook. I mean, if I am going somewhere and I know I'll need my laptop... I will take my full size laptop and not have to bother with the Lilliputian screen. Do these marketers really think that this is going to work in the corporate market? Can you just see walking into a business meeting and taking out your pink, Willy Wonka styled EEPC and people are going to take you seriously??? I can see meetings now "Ok, everyone follow along with this spreadsheet... except for CHARLIE who can only see three lines at a time!" Also, I spend my days in a support center and I am constantly looking at people's machines over their shoulder. Making a 14 inch screen into a 7 inch screen is not going to make anyone's job any easier. Trying to share that is going to be a nightmare.

I just don't see the need for this product. Especially if you have an ipod/iphone or smart phone. If you want to make notebooks more portable, make them thinner, or use different materials that make them lighter. Solid state storage is a good idea as well. But making a laptop the size of a paperback book just seems unnecessary. You want to make a classroom computer? You want it to be wireless and a touchscreen? Make a tablet system that students pick up when they walk into the room - preloaded with today's lesson. There is no need to give them a whole computer that they can browse the porn sites with and hang out on youtube.

Of course I have been wrong before... but this really smells like a passing fad.

Geez... not this crap again...

2008-05-24T15:01:00.002-04:00

Hello all. Just saw an article over at the NYT which discussed how chic it is to be "geek". While I'm glad that the computer pastime is no longer something in and of itself to laugh at, I'm really not sure what to think about the social consequences of "the age of the geek". I would honestly be happier if geeks were just a accepted part of society and not placed in the arena of dictating fashion, trends and pop-culture. To be honest, there are FAR too many wanna-be geeks.

Many of you don't know that I have a theory about the dot com bubble that burst some years ago. The theory is called "bubba got a book". And it, in my opinion, is EXACTLY why the IT industry has most of the problems it has today. The theory, in a nutshell, is that towards the close of the 20th century, more and more businesses were finding a need to have computer and network support. Everyone had an office network, EVERYONE was on the internet, and there was alot of opportunity for "geeks" to find work doing what they liked. Only, regular lay people started hearing about the "technology boom" and how much money that good computing professionals can make. Unfortunately, these people did not REALLY understand anything about computers and the internet, (of course most of them thought they were computer experts because they knew where the "Start" button was) and most of them had not even used a computer until well into their adult life. Well, the industry saw this coming and in its infinite wisdom, decided that they should make classes and tests about each company's technology. These were called "certifications". But what they really were giving was a glorified how-to manual and multiple choice test, charging a metric ass-load of money, and giving certs.

Of course the problem is that most of these "paper MCSE's or paper SCNE's" started getting job based on their certifications, but most of them had never acuallty done any IT work, Half of the Cisco certified people had never touched a router. And the industry got screwed a few times. They learned quickly and now if you don't have 10 years experience already doing an IT job you apply for, they won't even look at you. 'Course, you still had all these paper MCSE's running around thinking they are computer gods. And many of them had experience -- it was just BAD experience before they got fired.

I'm thinking that these "geek life" throwbacks are a symptom of this problem. Many of these paper cert people figure, "hey I am not a geek but if I act like a geek and talk like a geek"...
I just can't figure out why I'm a geek, I always was a geek, and I'm STILL a pariah. Damnit. That just pisses me off.

The Obsession with the "Desktop"

2008-05-18T14:37:00.002-04:00

I saw an interesting article over at Linux.com that talks about Linux being ready for the desktop. According to the author, he thinks that the phrase "ready for the desktop" should be retired as it is overused and no longer relevant to modern Linux. While I agree that this phrase is far overused, the author comes to the conclusion that the reason it is no longer relevant is because it is subjective; because different people use computers for different things, there is no "One-size-fits-all" easy OS.

This is where the author and I disagree. The subjectivity of the desktop is a valid point. Of course, that does not excuse Linux from having serious desktop-related problems. First, The availability of any kind of entertainment software including games on the Linux platform quite frankly, blows. In addition, sometimes changes do require use of the command line, and I think it is pretty clear that average users are daunted by these tasks. I mean, that is what the GUI was invented for. For Linux to have problems like these and try to market itself to the average user is inexcusable. Not for Linux itself, mind you, but for the people who are convinced that Linux should be on everyone's desktop by any means necessary. Gee, ravenously wanting to take over the desktop of every user's computer in the world... where have I heard this before... Oh yeah from MICROSOFT. Only they DID have gaming and entertainment as parts of their products for a very long time. Say what you will about Microsoft but they make one HELL of a user interface.

I'm not saying that this is impossible to accomplish with Linux. Far from it. But one thing I often see is people's faces when I show them the video of LinuxMCE in action. Now THAT is a user interface. And it has lots of extras, but lets be honest. The core is not exactly the easiest thing in the world to get going properly, but once you do and put terminals next to every tv in the house, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. But users don't equate the UI for LinuxMCE with a regular desktop computer. After all, its on your TV, there is no keyboard and they navigate with their remote control. But there is the rub. There are PLENTY of other ways for people to use Linux, far more than can be used with Windows.

Windows is, in my opinion, a one trick pony. But give them credit, its a pretty damn good trick. Windows dominates "the desktop." I understand why corperations use Windows servers, but I really think that the stability of *nix on servers, and the multitude of configuration options and support for scripting and its better use of system resources sells Linux for servers every time. But lay people know Microsoft products. They know Windows. And I don't care what any IT staff tells you, the fact that more people ar familliar with the OS is a LARGE consideration for customers to choose Windows servers over Linux servers.

Now far be it from me to suggest closing X.org and shutting down Gnome and KDE. Those projects have been around for decades and they are not going anywhere any time soon. But its time for Linux desktop evangelists to give up. The reality of the matter is most of the users that are going to use the Linux desktop as a desktop already do. Grandmothers who can bearly run windows are not going to want to learn Gnome. PC gamers are not going away either, and like it or not, they drive a LARGE part of the industry. You didn't REALLY think that people actually buy SLI 8800GTX's for spreadsheets do you?

But Linux has MANY strengths, far more than any of Microsoft's products. The failure of the Linux evangelists is that they don't play to the OS's strengths. Forget the desktop. Thats right forget it. There are many more options that are evolving that are going to change people's idea of a "desktop" anyway. There are more devices with their own ui that are going to become more of people's computing devices (iphone). And there will be less of a need for desktop applications when everything is going to be web applications soon. So forget the desktop. It is the greatest server OS there is (with the exception of FreeBSD of course.) It's capabilites as an embeded OS are miles greater than anything Microsoft has. In my opinion, the server market is more lucrative anyway. Lets get Windows off of servers. Let them keep the desktop until it turns into a dumb terminal that runs all of its apps of some Linux server through a browser.

If Linux dominates in the server market (where I know it can), and the embedded market, I will guarentee that those of us who do profit by having Linux widely distributed will be rolling in the hay. There are companies that run evrything on Solaris Servers. But you don't hear Sun complaining that Solaris "isn't ready for the destop" do you? (Granted Sun is not really happy that Linux is getting more shares of the server market, but that isn't really the point is it?) So everyone out there who wants Linux to succeed, look for different places for it to do so. The desktop battle was won long ago. Cry about it, or move on to something else.

Full porn downloads anywhere in the US?

2008-05-09T19:13:00.002-04:00

Hey just read this article and I wanted to pop my $0.02 in on it. Its at the NYT and its called Technology Group Plans Wireless Network. Its about the consortum who are getting together to build a wide broadband wireless network. Now I don't know about you, but unless you live under a rock, you hadto be expecting this ( oh I know with my previous article I said that nobody can predict tech trends but this one is a real no-brainer.) With the penetration of wireless devices like cell phones and PDA's this was inevitable. However, it claims that they are trying to match speeds of current broadband providers. Which I suppose is a good thing, and by the time they actually do implement this broadband wirless network, the wired infrastructure in the country will be mostly fiber (hopefully).

However i'm wondering what exactly the effect this will have on the structure of the current internet. I mean, I have a mobile blog . But trust me, posting via mobile is a whole lot different than READING blogs mobile. Sure instead of actually hitting the blogger page, you can hit my feedburner feed, and it looks ok on a mobile, but REALLY, if mobile is going to be king, it needs to have alot of changes. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. From the article though it kind of sounds like they are actually hoping to replace all internet connections with this wide broadband network ( on the consumer level at least ). I'm not sure this is going to work. I mean I have wi-fi on my laptop and I love it, but if there is a wired connection, its much faster and far more stable. I mean there is nothing wrong with my Wi-Fi access point, but wired still delivers data beter than any wireless. I know that the spectrum is different but wireless is wireless. FM radio's are wireless and they still don't get pure connections on the fringe ranges. It will turn into "who is lucky enough to live under a wireless tower?" versus "the only internet I can get is wireless broadband, but out in the styx it maybe works every other day."

I suppose my question is: are people ready for a change like this? Maybe they are maybe they are not. I for one will still be holding on to my wired service provider (hopefully fiber by then). I may consider this as a secondary option for my mobile stuff, but I'm not sure I would be comfortable paying what I pay now for service that gets disrupted during sunspots.

And here's Carnac the Magnificent !

2008-05-09T14:52:00.005-04:00

I was reading Slashdot this morning and saw a link to a Geek.com story entitled The x86 evolution will lead the revolution. Now I'm not exactly sure what "revolution" this is talking about. There are so many these days. But one thing that I have learned in all my time in the industry is that technology ALWAYS changes, and trends can NEVER be predicted with 100% accuracy. How many of you bought a PhysX by ageia? How many of you would have 5 years ago predicted that AMD would get consistently spanked in performance by Intel's LOWER end processors? For many years in this industry people try to make predictions that they are SURE are going to come true. I can't tell you how many predicted that ATI would dominate the graphics card market. But they ended up in trouble and got bought by AMD. Now neither AMD or ATI has a leading product in their market (and it is not for lack of trying).

Or 3dfx? They REALLY dominated the graphics market in the late 90's. EVERYONE said that the 3dfx cards were far better than that Riva or Rage products (by Nvidia and ATI respectively). After the company released its Voodoo 3 card it seemed to disappear into a puff of smoke. Nobody predicted that with 100% accuracy. This industry is one of the most dynamic industries I have ever observed. Even in the retail support market, which I heavily work in, technology turns around at the drop of a hat. First its capacitive touchscreen technology. Then it is resitive. Then, infrared touch rings around the screen. Then back to resistive. And every time the new tech is touted as the answer for all of the design problems in the units. And it will be something else next month. I can't tell you how many times the IT and computer industry has flip/flopped. Its the nature of high tech.

Now don't get me wrong. It is a fantastic feat of the x86 architecture to have survived as an industry standard for so long. Heck, I remember when "x86" architecture was known as "IBM compatible". And even that nomenclature lasted for a long time. So lets give the platform its due. The above article cites the use of increasingly smaller nm production processes, thinner substrates and better power efficiency like in Intel's new mobile chip the Atom. He mentions the 64-bit x86 technology extensions. However, he uses that for evidence of the platform's dominance. Personally, though 64-bit capable chips are well dispersed through the market, MOST of them are not taking advantage of the 64-bit extensions i.e. running a 64-bit OS. I'm sure they will, when they discover that they can't see all 4GB of their system memory in 32-bit mode, but that has yet to happen.

From a distance, one could see how the author made the assumption that x86 will continue to dominate. It has a track record of success, and it was even recently adopted by Apple for its Macs, abandoning the PowerPC market. (Who could have predicted THAT 5 years ago?) But believe me folks, it can all turn around in an instant. Let me lay out this scenario. What if I bring to the market a new, RISC based processor? It doesn't run any native x86 apps. It DOES, however, have a complete Virtual Machine. Virtualization is new and hot, and especially in server environments, it is the answer to alot of issues. Many people are using it. It runs virtual machines far better and more efficient than an x86 based machine. It would be very easy for a product like this to dominate the server market, especially if that customer is using virtual machines as an exclusive infrastructure. They could care less what kind of instruction set the physical cpu has, just so long as their virtual machines are solid. Virtualization may make all hardware platforms as we know them totally interchangeable. You could then run the VM on any hardware you chose. The second you make something faster and cheaper then -- Boom. Server x86 use goes out the window. Now this hasn't happened but it EASILY could.

Also, the author states that x86 will dominate in the mobile and embedded market. Again I have to say this is MASSIVE speculation by the author, almost to the point of being laughable. The future does look bright for embedded x86. But it is difficult at best to hold on to that market. Just ask Motorola. Or Transmeta. Or Palm for God's sake! Or any of the people who were going to change mobile computing for years to come. Perhaps x86 will evolve into a standard instruction set for all VM's in the future, leaving its legacy not in silicon chips, but in an idea, a multi-platform programming standard. That does not invalidate the author's point, but it isn't anywhere near the hardware dominance that he predicts.

The moral of this story is that its ok to speculate, but don't be surprised if those far touted theories crumble. Other than the history lesson, which I might add is very good work by this author, this article is more speculative than the psychic hotline. I encourage people to think about the future, but the main thing about it is that no person on this planet knows for certain what the future holds. Especially in the computer industry.

Who own software? Why does it matter?

2008-05-06T16:17:00.002-04:00

I just saw an article over at Slashdot. In the article apparently Blizzard is suing MDY industries over the creation of the World of Warcraft (WOW) glider program. Check it out here.

Now, I understand Blizzard's point of view. I have written several bits of software here and there. Something great, especially something that has had a lot of time and effort put into it, means something special to the creator. Its almost like a child to them. It must be difficult to see people doing things with your creation that you did not intend for them to do. I imagine that Edison and Tesla had similar reactions when the heard of the invention of the electric chair. A rather grim image, but I imagine that these electrical pioneers did not have death by electrocution in mind when they created their inventions. OK, its a more brutal implication than the unauthorized use of software, but I think it drives the point across. Another good analogy is Oppenheimer's reaction to the atom bomb.

I in no way wish to trivialize the emotions felt by Blizzard when they learned the discovery of the Glider program. However, there is one thing that the creators of the above technologies learned, that clearly Blizzard has yet to learn, is that when you give something to the world, it cannot be taken back. People still get the electric chair, and there are MANY nuclear weapons, much to Oppenheimer's chagrin.

Once Pandora's box has been opened it cannot be closed again; Prometheus cannot return the fire he stole. Blizzard, you created a large and prosperous virtual community, you need to know that there will always be people that are successful in subverting the rules in any society. And sometimes there is nothing you can do to stop them. I will say one thing to Blizzard. Don't take a note from the RIAA, keep this out of the courts. Ban the offenders, kill accounts, patch the software, but mark my words, legal action will not stop people from abusing your software.

In my opinion, ownership is not the question. It does not matter to me who owns the software, Blizzard would not like it even if the abusers DID own the software. And it isn't up to the government to enforce rules in YOUR virtual world. That is your job Blizzard, not the United States government's. Not to point fingers, but clearly the folks at Blizzard have the liberal, half-baked idea that the government should be used as the answer to EVERYTHING. Frankly, and I'm sorry if I'm alone on this but Blizzard needs to man up a little. Sometimes its better to beat the crap out of a bully than run and tattle to Uncle Sam. You should have learned that around age ten. This lawsuit is a waste of my tax dollars. Enforce this from the inside Blizzard. Don't make it a legal issue.

Keeping with the child analogy, eventually, you have to come to terms with the fact that the world is a very dangerous place and there is nothing that you can do but eventually let them go. You should have known that this was an acceptable risk the minute you decided to put WOW on the shelves.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

The Geek Budget

2008-05-04T19:24:00.001-04:00

I've been having some money problems lately. I'm sure that this is a pretty common problem these days. My wife doesn't work. She is trying to get a job, but I don't need to tell you that the job market is less-than-stellar lately.

Sure, there is the fear of losing our house, our cars breaking down, not having enough money to pay bills. That stuff I try to take in stride. We can handle it. Being a geek however, might have resulted in a unique problem. No friends, I am not worried about the things that I should be worried about.

I have an AMD Athlon 64 Fx 51 as my main machine at the house. It has served me well, but it is getting a little long in the tooth. First, it uses REGISTERED MEMORY. So adding more than the current 1GB of ram is very cost-prohibitive. It has an Nvidia 7600 gs, which is ok, but the motherboard only has an AGP slot. So that's pretty much the end of the line as far as that goes. The socket is 940, so a CPU upgrade is pretty much out of the question.

My home server, which I have bragged about on this very blog, is a 1Ghz celeron with 384M of ram. It has a bunch of smallish IDE drives. It runs ok for a headless box, but it doesn't quite do everything I want.

I don't even have any dedicated *nix boxes anymore. They have either been sold or broken or just plain too old to use.

So what does this have to do with my money situation? Well I have plenty of financial issues hounding me, but I have no money to upgrade equipment. And its killing me. I mean, it really makes me depressed. Its kind of sad and sick in a way, that I am more worried about buying new hardware than losing my house. I wonder if any other geeks have had similar experiences. It is well documented that geeks often develop addictions; just look at the WOW zombies, the porn junkies, the guys that would rather code than have sex with their girlfriends (or FIND girlfriends for that matter).

Is it possible to be addicted to computer hardware? Have any other geeks craved upgrading their old stuff so badly that they cannot get it out of their heads? I constantly think about the cheapest ways to build a new box, but I just can't seem to find the money.

Do non geeks do this too? Do normal people have similar desires? How do they deal with it? I tell myself that I won't be broke forever, but I just keep getting more and more broke. Even my wing phone and my psp were given to me by my parents and my sisters. You know what I gave them? Framed pictures of my little boy. We just couldn't afford anything else.

How does one shake the nagging feeling of failure; of longing every time I stare at my old dusty hardware? How exactly does one be a broke geek? Does anyone have any advice?

If you are feeling generous, you can hit the donate button on this page. It doesn't have to be a lot, a buck will help and clicking some of the sponsors would be appreciated as well. Thanks for listening to this rant.

PV

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Testing moBlog

2008-05-04T14:14:00.002-04:00

Hey Everyone! I know, I know I have been very bad lately. You haven't heard from me since before Christmas.

However, I have a new lease on things and am going to be trying to turn over a different leaf.

This post is intended to re-announce this site. So consider this a re-grand opening of Panvamp's Digital Palace. This post is being made from my T-mobile wing phone. I always have it with me and I hope it will help me post more often.

I also have in the works a plan to post a new blog about my new found tech love-gadget, Sony's INCREDIBLE PSP. I will be sure to link back here so you know just where to find it. I have videos planned and tutorials. I even have one or two of my own little programs to post.

I am planning to have a fully MMS capable mobile blog as well, so those who care can catch little snippets of my life from time to time.

And if I can possibly produce those projects, I have in mind another special blog that probably has been tried before, but I am sure I can do it better. But that is in the future and will remain a surprise until then.

So Happy new year, April Fools, or anything else I missed.

Panvamp is back.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Bioshock or Some Geeks are NEVER Satisfied

2007-12-06T15:36:00.000-05:00

Slashdot had a post linking to Eurogamer documenting Problems with Bioshock. Bioshock is a game published by 2k Games. In my not so humble opinion, this is probably the best game I have played all year. Released on the XBOX360 and the PC, Bioshock is a first person shooter with some RPG elements. It is visually stunning, with immersive environments, realistic enemy AI and pretty much does a very good job of immersing the player in the game world. Now I know that this is said of many games but really, Bioshock makes you feel like you are really there. But the above things arn't even the best part of the game.

The best part is the story. I found the story very engaging, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Another big part about the story I like was the working of the game's nonphysical weapons, magical/psychic weapons called plasmids into the story. They aren't just weapons that you find on the ground, they are intrinsic to the genetic manipulation/addiction part of the plot. Add to that, the fact that the whole game takes place in a network of underwater buildings. And the story of the game is a look about what can happen in a truly free society, sort of the libertarian worst-case scenario. It is a society that develops a class division based on looks and good genetics, and money, of course. Plus, there are no drug laws in this society, so the lower echelon is made up of crazy drug addicts. And since there is no gun control, they are crazy drug addicts with guns. I know I always wanted to live in a society like that but this is sort of a what-not-to-do for any good libertarian. Add to that, the society's culture is based in a 1940's-ish atmosphere, complete with old music and tommy guns.

There are a few problems with the game, but they are relatively minor in my view. One, the game has no "lives". Every time you are killed, you respawn at a "vita-chamber" sort of a rolling save point. I can see that many people do not like the idea of infinite respawning. People can feel that this does not provide enough challenge or incentive to stay alive. That would be the cas if not for the other minor flaw in the game: its REALLY, REALLY hard. Oh sure lots of you are going to say "What a wuss, it isn't that bad," you guys are on crack. The story about finishing the game using just the pistol? Chambers make the game too easy? Trust me, if there were no chambers, nobody would have finished this game. Taking down enemies like "Big-Daddy" takes a LOT of work. I've also noticed that they seem to be a little stingy on ammo and health. So really, very minor issues. I personally like the hacking mini games and the vending machines. It's a nice break from just running and shooting.

The article defends critical points that geek gamers have had with the game. I still stand by, regardless of those issues, my statement to make this "game-of-the-year". But I guess there are some geeks who had "problems" with the game. If you look through the article, some of those points are just ludicrous. It seems that the article's author and I pretty much agree about the game. My point is, however, that he shouldn't even have to answer those points. Why? Because the only reason that anyone would have any problem with this game at all is because geeks are NEVER satisfied. Never. The sarcasm about the constant critic in my article How to be a geek in 10 easy steps is true. Bioshock is a great game, and it most likely WILL be game of the year on many places where it counts. Yet there are geeks that will rip it to shreds. I'm totally perplexed why geeks do this. It seems the gaming industry is one of the only industries where game of the year has people that cry "the ending sucks" or "the respawn system is horrible". I mean when is the last time a movie won best picture even though most viewers say "the ending sucks!" The last time a musician won a Grammy even though the track arrangement was horrible? It generally does not happen. That is because of the simple fact that geeks are not happy unless they are criticizing someone, somewhere.

I really don't know why geeks do this. Maybe its that over-inflated sense of self worth. Perhaps they are pretty much perfectionists. But you would think that if geeks never liked anything, then nothing in the geek world would ever be popular. But things are popular. This game will be high on any games-of-the-year lists regardless of the fact that it seems many geeks don't like it. It leads me to the conclusion that geeks like anything, but they like complaining even more. I think the Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons summed it up with one statement. Coming out of a film that is supposed to represent Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, he says "Worst film ever. I will only be seeing it five more times. Today." As parodic as that is, I have YET to come up with a line that has more insight on geeks and criticism.

I am an anomaly when it comes to criticism. I really don't like criticizing anything. I guess that makes me a strange geek, but I just don't see the point. You like something great. You don't? Don't play it, don't watch it, don't listen to it. But for the love of god, man up and stop complaining.

Art must be and will be free

2007-12-03T20:01:00.000-05:00

Here at PDP, I'd like to take a moment apart from doing the home server how-to's to comment on a recent Internet phenomenon. If you haven't seen the video 2 girls 1 cup, you need to. It is probably the most wretchedly disgusting piece of video that I have seen in a very long time, or possibly ever. I will NOT be linking to it because I am certain that it will violate some rules with my nice host, Blogger, and my sponsors and advertisers.

Why do you need to see it, you ask? Am I actually endorsing sickening and stomach churning “pornography”? Well yes, indirectly. It's not the subject matter of the film, per se, but the Internet cultural reaction to the film that is important. It never ceases to amaze me as to what a brilliantly dynamic place the Internet truly is. The Internet phenomenon, such as the squirrel nuts or the dancing baby, were at one time the top things on the Internet. They peak in popularity than inevitably fade, becoming just another annoyingly stupid Internet cliche`. But for the months that they are popular, these viral Internet works have an amazing penetration (excuse the pun). Nearly EVERYONE who owns a computer and is on the Internet has been attracted to these things.

What is so special about 2 girls 1 cup? First, even though I'm not linking to it, I'm certain you will not have to look far to find this video. It wouldn't be viral if it was difficult to find. Ask around. EVERYONE has seen it, you can find someone to point you to it. Now, if I were to tell you exactly what the subject matter of the video is, you would never watch it. Suffice it to say, it is sickeningly vile. But here is the point. Regardless of the subject matter, millions of people have seen it, and many of them have convinced others to watch it. This is one of the most interesting things about a phenomenon like this. Much like the proverbial train wreck, most of the people, though offended and disgusted, will not be able to tear their eyes from it. They almost have to watch it in disbelief that a human being would be willing to participate in such a vile act.

Many of you are familiar with goatse, which, compared to 2 girls 1 cup, is a children's work. Regardless, millions upon millions are familiar with goatse, and they can instantly recall the shocking image, as well as their almost palpable disgust upon viewing it. To me, both goatse and 2 girls 1 cup are some of the most effective artworks that have existed in modern times.

Artwork, do I hear you say? Effective? Panvamp, have you gone mad? No friends, I haven't gone mad. To me, art is a work that invokes emotional feelings in the viewer, like the Sistine Chapel invokes a feeling of humility or divinity, and The Wizard of Oz invokes a sense of wonder. All works of art do this, great or not-so-great. In the case of goatse and 2 girls 1 cup, the emotion is not particularly pleasant, but the emotion is there nonetheless and it is very, very, strong. I mean do you know how powerful a set of moving images have to be to actually illicit a physical, vomitous response in some people? I don't feel it's up to us to decide which emotion the artwork invokes but there is no question that these works are effective at conveying the emotions. So, now that we have established that these works are indeed art, and they are good at doing what art is supposed to do, the amazing thing is the widespread nature of these. More people have seen these artworks than many classical paintings, and most of the people that do view these are affected more strongly than those people who see the Mona Lisa.

In some societies and cultures, these works are most likely illegal or, at the very least, considered “obscene”. Yet with the magic of the Internet, people in those societies can experience this work anyway. Why does everyone want to see these films? It's the same reason that people spend hours looking at Internet porn. They provoke responses that societies have stated are not good, and should be avoided. But people do not want to avoid emotions. They may think that they do, but people like having emotions, and the act of provoking them is something that they enjoy. Thats why great books, gripping stories, beautiful paintings, and yes, even disgusting pieces of film are watched by so many people. Entertainment is arguably the largest part of people's lives. And people want to especially see “Taboo” pieces of art, JUST because society says they are bad. People WANT art to be no-holds-barred. People want a free expression of information. They don't want limits placed on expression.

I think nothing illustrates this more than the amount of people clamoring to see what they know will shock and offend. Maybe that's one of the reasons that so many people are offended by so many things. Do they enjoy the emotional response? Do they like to have their blood boiled, their stomachs turned, and their skin crawl? I think the answer is yes. The Internet, while in a relatively free and uncensored state (I'm looking at you, China!), is the perfect vehicle for ideas, especially for ideas that are “offensive” though apparently “popular”. Perhaps the anonymity is the factor. “No I'd never watch smut like that,” is probably a common response when people ask others about this video in real life, but trust me, with the door closed, computer is on, and that sweet, sweet, information injection coursing through their veins, the can't help themselves. I mean there is a REASON that there is so much porn on line. Thats what people want!

So go find it, experience it, let it sicken you, let it revolt you and enjoy the fact that you have emotions and emotional responses to things. Its easy to say that we shouldn't have emotions that are offensive or revolting, but first it will be obscenity, then unpopular speech, then violence and soon we say that the only reason that there is anything wrong is because people have any emotions. If you want a little view of that, check out the excellent Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale. No gross out movies in that society I can tell you. And a society who cannot handle ideas, even shocking and revolting ones, is not a society that I want to live in. And thank God for the Internet, for without it we may have lost a worldwide outlet of idea exchange that can influence so many of our lives.

Installing a home server -- Networking Considerations

2007-12-02T04:58:00.000-05:00

Hopefully, if you have read by article on building a home server, you have a good idea what you want to do with your box that you will be building. My detailed tutorials are going to be from the perspective of setting up an all-in-one router/firewall/gateway/webserver/media server. You can most likely omit any of the sections and ignore what you will not be needing. If you have a hardware firewall/router, for example, you can ignore the steps about sharing the network connections and setting up the firewall. Some of the steps depend on the others, like the need to install an sql database if you wish to properly use php. But If you don't need to have a shared drive, you can skip the file sharing part.

But the one aspect of this server that pretty much cannot be ignored is that it is going to be on a network. I thought that I would lay out some of the networking concepts that I will be using in building our home servers. This is by NO means a course on networking. If that's what you are looking for, hit a search engine and see what you can find. There are literally countless pages that have as much networking info as you need.

First and foremost, lets discuss IP addressing. An IP address is like a phone number that tells others on the network where the computer is located. If you are using the machine as a router/gateway, you will probably have 2 network connections on the machine. One probably goes to your cable modem or DSL modem. The other will go into a switch or hub in your house that your other computers are going to connect to. Let's call your internet connected network "external" or the "outside" connection, and the other will be called the "internal" or "inside" connection. If you are already network savvy, the outside connection is the WAN connection, and the inside interface is the LAN. Each of these connections will have a different IP address. You probably will not have many options for your external IP. Either that interface gets its IP from your Internet service provider (ISP) automatically using the DHCP protocol, or you will have been assigned a static IP address and subnet mask. This is vital information and you will not be able to complete this setup without it.

The internal address is something I want to touch on a little bit. Your internal interface is pretty much going to HAVE to be set to a non-changing, static address. The reason for this is that you do not want it to change because then the internal computers will not know where your server is exactly, and using DHCP to configure this interface will not always guarantee this. (There are some ways to make it happen, but those are beyond the scope of this article). When it comes to IP addressing and networks, certain rules have to be followed. Your internal network most likely is a private network, so you will have to use ip address ranges in the "Class C" range. This is a special range of IP addresses that can be used for internal private networks like yours. Valid ranges are : 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 and 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255. Any addresses in those range are valid and legal. For example you can give your internal interface of 10.0.0.5 or 192.168.1.1. For various reasons that will be illustrated during the XP routing section in the next article, I recommend that you assign your internal interface to the address of 192.168.0.1 with the default subnet mask. In addition to XP's special requirements, I recommend using this as your internal IP even if you are going the *nix route. It will simplify many of the subsequent steps. You do not HAVE to do this, but I really see no reason why you wouldn't use 192.168.0.1.

Next you will want to decide the way your clients will be connecting to your server. You may either run a DCHP server on your home server and assign your clients addresses automatically, or you may manually assign static IP addresses to your client PC's (or you can have a mix of the two if you follow some guidelines). To be honest, DHCP can sometimes have problems if your outside interface also uses DHCP, but I will show you how to use either way, and really this is a case of personal preference. Decide on this before you start, however.

Also, you need to think about how this machine will be administered. If you are going to want to administer your server over the internet and you have a static IP address, then don't worry, you should be able to access your static IP from any internet connected computer. If you have an ISP that gives you a DHCP address, you can never know when your assigned IP is going to change. If this is the case, hope is not lost. you can use something called a Dynamic DNS. I use No-ip, and if you are willing to use their domains, you can get an actual internet address like mysrvr.noip.com. There is a little program that we can install on the server that will let your dynamic DNS always know the location of your machine no matter how many times it may change. There are other dynamic DNS services, and you should pick one out. For a fee, you can usually get an actual domain and register it with these services like www.mysrvr.com. If you have a static IP you can just register a domain name and have it point to your static address.

Finally, you will need to know about NAT and port forwarding. NAT or Network Address Translation, in layman's terms is essentially this: As far as the outside network or internet is concerned, a request to the internet from any of the clients in your private network looks like it is coming from your outside interface ip address. If you Google NAT you will find extensive information about its nuances, but it's just a principle that says that the ONLY IP address that the rest of the world can see is your outside interface. Here's a dirty little diagram

remote computer--> Outside interface( 9.6.74.15)<-NAT Router-> insideinterface(192.168.0.1) --- client 1(192.168.0.7)

Say remote computer one is an internet web server. Client 1 types this web server address into his browser. The remote computer's web site appears. But as far as the remote computer can see, the request to display his site came from 9.6.74.15. In fact, it isn't even aware that 192.168.0.7 even exists. But how does the outside interface know to send the web site information back to client 1? It uses NAT routing. This is exactly what NAT is designed to do. Most home servers and hardware firewalls/routers use this exact mechanism. This is NAT in a nutshell.

One of the problems with NAT is that if the request for information is NOT initiated by one of the client computers, there is not a way to send any information to client 1. Say remote computer is your work PC at your office, away from your private network. Also, lets say you are not running a web server on your NAT router, but you are running it on client 1. If you type in 192.168.0.7, chance are you will get a page not found message. Thats because your office PC doesn't even see 192.168.0.7. It has no direct route to get there. So how can you access that machine's web server from your office?

This is where port forwarding comes in. You can set the NAT router to route all traffic from remote computers to port 80 (the default web server port) directly to 192.168.0.7. So any request that is made to 9.6.74.15 on port 80, will get sent directly to client 1. So after you set up port forwarding, at your office computer type 9.6.74.15 and poof, you will be shown the web page being served on 192.168.0.7. Any other port will still get processed by the NAT router, but all port 80 requests will go to client 1. You can even run web servers on BOTH machines if they use different ports. I'll touch on that during the installation of the server software.

The great part about this comes with respect to hackers and intruders. Because of NAT, the only machine that malicious intruders will ever be able to hit without being invited or knowing about your port forwarding scheme is your home server. That means that if you run a firewall on the server, you can block any malicious traffic to any of your clients. This eliminates the need to install software firewalls on any of your clients, because the NAT router blocks all of those attacks before they ever hit any clients. Cool, huh?

So do some research, get familiar with the above concepts, and in our next installment we'll begin building a windows XP based home server. I'm really looking forward to it.

Installing a home server

2007-11-30T20:04:00.000-05:00

One of the things that I am the most proud of in my technical life has not been anything I have done at work (though there is quite alot of stuff I have done at work that I am proud of). Nope, one of the most things that I am proud of is my home server. There is alot of talk about Windows Home Server , but in my opinion, this kind of implementation is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a file server, a glorified NAS box. My home server fulfills many roles like:

webserver

ftp server

shared media drive

NAT router (yes router)

firewall

video encoder (from command line no less)

WiFi AP

streaming music server

remote bittorrent downloader

mail server

group ware server

database server

DNS Server

DHCP Server

My server fulfills all of the roles above, and can be remotely administered through ssh. The entire thing runs on commodity hardware. In fact it runs on a nearly seven year old Celeron 1GHZ with 384Megs of ram and a 17GB and 120GB hdd. That, combined with an Ethernet switch, is one powerful little network. Regardless of being a "home" server, learning how to build and use one can teach principles of large servers and corporate networks. You can even expand to include other servers and have your own little cluster.

When building a server like this, first, ask yourself WHY you want to build it. What do you need it for, what do you want it to do, are there better alternatives? Before you ask, "because it would be cool and I can learn all sorts of things" IS a perfectly viable answer as to why you want to build your own server. What you want it to do however, is something you want to spend more time on. You should try to plan a little bit for this. What role is this machine going to fulfill? Is it going to just be a firewall/router? Then perhaps m0n0wall is for you. Just an NAS device? Try Freenas . For versatility and growth however, you may want to stick with a full OS like Linux or FreeBSD . It's even possible to use some versions of Windows.
In fact, my server started as a windows 2000 server and it ran great for a few years. I'd recommend using one of the *nixes, because I find them more robust for a server, and keep in mind, even if your desktop clients are all Windows, you can still use Linux or BSD for your server. They do play nice together with a little work.

In subsequent weeks, I will take a look a closer look and give more of a how-to for setting up some of the particulars of home servers, but I'd like to make some reccomendations here on what to decide in the planning stage.

One, decide how you are going to interact with your server on a regular basis. You will most likely need a mouse, keyboard, and monitor when you set up your server, but one of my goals was to have a box that was a mere appliance, and that meant headless. All administration on my box is done remotely through SSH. I can do this from work or from my home desktop. The caveat about this is that you really need to learn how to use the command line and command line tools. But you CAN load the Xorg gui or using windows remote desktop. You are going to want to keep your box running efficiently though, and you will find that graphical interfaces take up more overhead than most of you are going to want.

Two, decide what sort of hardware you are going to run on. Even Windows 2000 can run on some pretty thin hardware. FreeBSD and Linux headless machines can run on almost a pocket calculator (ok well not THAT thin, but you will be surprised). The processing power and memory are not the only considerations. Do you want to run RAID to handle your files? How much storage are you looking at? Will you have a separate drive for the operating system than you do for storage? If you are running as a router, you will need at least two network cards. If it's also going to be an access point, you will need a compatible WiFi card. Is it going to be in a little box in the closet, or will it be on your desk? How far away are you going to be running? Do you need to run Ethernet cables? Do you want to upgrade your network hardware to gigabit speed? I personally find that 100Mbps is fine for serving video and audio, but you may want to run multiple clients and feeds. Do you have plans to backup your data on an external drive?

Three, try and figure out some of the roles that your machine will be performing? Do you already have a hardware firewall/router? Do you need a DNS? Do you want to keep everything static, or use DHCP? Do you understand the basic theory behind IP addressing, subnets and NAT? Are you going to need a database for anything (if you plan on running php web pages, the answer to that is yes)? Is it going to be on all of the time? How are you going to secure the system or your shares?

Fourth, there are some miscellaneous considerations to think about. What kind of internet connection are you going to use? How is your internet connectivity? When I first set up my servers, my ISP had blocked incoming ports 80 and 25, which are the standard web server and mail server ports. I had to run both of those services on non-standard ports. See I learned something almost right off the bat. Then there is a time factor to be considered. My server grew and evolved over time to the machine that it is now. Don't try to do everything at once. It can take quite a while to install the various things on the machine. Give yourself time. Remember, this is a project. If you need this to be a mission critical machine, you may want to familiarize yourself with commercial server technologies. This is also beyond the scope of this article.

So get prepared, think about what you want, and next week, I will give a step-by-step guide to setting up a Windows based server, and for the two weeks after that, we'll look at using Fedora and FreeBSD for a similar purpose. I'm splitting the open source version into two weeks worth, and since many of the princples are the same for FreeBSD and Linux.

Danger of violent video games?

2007-11-30T15:13:00.000-05:00

Hello there folks. I just saw a post on Slashdot entitled Violent Games 'Almost' As Dangerous as Smoking. And as a good violent-video-game-playing geek, I though perhaps I would weigh in my personal opinion.

First, just looking at the title, the article implies one of two things. Either a) violent media is the cause of almost as many deaths as smoking, or b) smoking is not as dangerous as originally thought. I'll tell you right now that it is not the latter, and as a smoker I was very disappointed to find that out. now if you haven't read the article please do so now. Click here TV, film and game violence seen as a threat . If you don't know, I have a little son, Logan. As a father, I am constantly considering what the effects of the media on my child will be, regardless of the fact that he is really too young to see any violent TV or play any violent games. And let me tell you, where the media is concerned, the level of violence in the media is the LEAST of my worries.

Now I realize that at this point most of you will be saying OMG, what a horrible father Panvamp is letting his young child watch violent media! This is not true. I will not let my kid watch anything that I feel is too over-the-top. No Kill Bill for my little guy, until I feel he is mature enough to handle it. I'm not going to be against him watching Spongebob Squarepants because there is a part where Spongebob gets hit with a rock. Or any of the Looney Tunes that are deemed "violent" nowadays that were once considered "slapstick". I have little problem with him seeing it, because if he decides to take a note from Spongebob and smack a playmate or say, his mother, with a rock, then he will be disciplined and punished and I guarantee he will not do it again, regardless of seeing it on TV again. This is part of an ancient skill called "parenting".

Notice that NONE of that has anything to do with the violence being a threat to his health or even "public health". How this relates to smoking deaths is beyond me. And when he is fifteen or sixteen and I do sit down and watch Kill Bill, I trust that my years of parenting will have convinced him that eviscerating someone with a razor sharp katana is just not something that should be done. If I felt that he would do that, not only have I failed as a parent, but there is no way he would be watching violent movies. But believe me, I will not let my kid grow up to be someone that is particularly violent. Will he get into fight or two? Sure. That is part of life. The aforementioned article seems to imply that exposure to violent media will make him more of a danger to health. Of course it fails to mention just WHO'S health. His health? "Public health"? I'm not sure.

The article seems to make a leap of logic as well. Even a smoker can tell you that smoking is not good for you and if you smoke enough, it likely will kill you. The article cites a study where people exposed to violent media are found to be more aggressive than normal. But aggression does not equal death. Not by a long shot. As anyone in the sales and business world will tell you, the aggressive marketers generally win over the more passive marketers. Aggression is good in the sports world as well (but I don't see any articles claiming football or boxing is as dangerous as smoking). Aggression is part of life, and in life, the more aggressive generally do better than the passive. Sure, there are limits on aggression. As in sports, life has rules. There are acceptable uses of aggression that can be used as long as these rules are followed. Hopefully, that is where that whole parenting thing comes in. believe me, I don't want my son being too passive either. If he lets people walk all over him, his enjoyment out of life will be far less. Some of the above statements will not be seen as politically correct, but it does not make them any less true.

Many of you will state that there seems to be a definite rise of violence in the modern world. While this is subjective, I can concur that there do seem to be more shootings and violence attributed to younger people these days. I can imagine that the average person will make the logical leap that these people were raised with violence and therefore violent media causes these incidents. I will go out on a limb here and say that it is not the violent media that causes these things, but a distinct lack of proper parenting. With the rising divorce rates and single parent families, I feel that I have more than a leg to stand on in regards to that statement. I'm not saying that divorced families or single parents cannot make good parents. To me, I feel that a single parent must work twice as hard to parent a child. I realize that it is hard work, but this is the price of having children. When parenting is not done, the child will fall through the cracks. They will become adults that were not told that violence in media should not be emulated and they did not learn that there is a punishment for being violent outside the rules of society.

There is one place where violent media and smoking are related. I realize that as my son gets older, despite my amount of parenting, he will be getting into things and doing things that I don't want him to do. Despite all of their hard efforts my parents ended up with me being a smoker. They were good parents, they told me smoking was bad. I made the choice at 15 to start smoking and the truth is, there really was nothing they could do to stop me. Violence is the same. If I was going to watch something at 15 that they didn't want me to watch, chances are I was going to do it anyway. I am not a violent killer now however, because my parents instilled in me values. They taught me the right thing to do. It didn't matter that I played games where I "fragged the weak, hurdled the dead", I knew that in real life, killing is wrong. I could go on and on stating that gun violence is on the rise because people do not train their kids how to use and respect a firearm, but that is really beyond the scope of this argument. The point here is that proper parenting is supposed to prepare a person for just these type of situations.

I think that if we want to avoid violence in the future society, we need to spend time with your kids. If you cannot handle this, please do not have children. Lord knows I don't want to get a bullet in the back because you didn't tell your kid that shooting someone like in Grand Theft Auto is not appropriate.

On Mailboxes and White Houses

2007-11-28T15:34:00.000-05:00

Recently, I finished reading Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort. If you are into Interactive Fiction (IF) or have been in the past, this book is an excellent title on the subject. It's not that long of a read, but it provides a wonderful insight into the evolution and history of IF, especially Infocom products (arguably the best commercial IF). There are a few issues that I had while reading, but overall an outstanding work.

I want to break this review down by saying a little something about each chapter of the book. To me, the books preliminary chapters were sort of a slow read. The first chapter defined the "text adventure" and IF as to what it is, and what it is not. Likened to more of an electronic novel experience, the author makes a clear distinction as to what he will be discussing, as well as some of the history of interactive text and hypertext or electronic text. I found this chapter interesting, but I would imagine readers that were not familiar with IF will probably want to spend a little more time understanding the subject matter. Those who are quite familiar with the form may want to peruse this chapter quickly.

The second chapter discusses the riddle throughout history, literature and games. While riddles tend to fascinate me, this chapter had more of a "college research paper" feel to it. In fact, the first two chapters seemed to drag a little, and there were more than a few spots where the author's prose becomes a little "wordy", even catching a run-on sentence here and there . I can see, however, that these chapters are necessary, especially for readers less familiar with the form and computer gaming in general. There are a few choice riddles that I was not familiar with, but for the most part I had been exposed to many of the riddles and the history of them already.

The third chapter, in my opinion, is where the author truly begins to shine. I found myself fascinated by the evolution of Adventure, arguably the first well-known computer IF. He examines some of the university and research works in computer language interpretation, and the rise of some rather intelligent interpreters that came before Adventure, in addition to a detailed look at the first programming and limited academic distribution of
the work on some of the very first electronic networks. Perhaps even more fascinating, the author notes the various versions that were produced. One of the more interesting facets here is a look at how the source code was passed to subsequent authors, and how the versions of Adventure that people are familiar with today are the result of several authors, making it one of the first electronically collaborated work of its kind.

The fourth chapter pertains largely to Zork and works that were developed using large mainframes. For those who don't know IF at all (and its pretty hard for any geeks never to have heard of Zork), Zork is a fantasy IF work that became the public face of IF and Infocom. It is by far my favorite of the Infocom published titles. The version that is discussed in this chapter, though, is not the commercial version, but the sprawling, cavernous version developed at MIT by the original implementors (authors). It looks at some other works that were developed and distributed using the mainframe method as well. In addition to looking at the works, a view of the environment is discussed at length, looking at the PDP mainframe usage and MIT's influence of IF as well.

Chapter five was the best chapter in the book, Taking a look at commercial Zork, as well as some of the other works published by the great Infocom corporation. Montfort takes an extensive look at Deadline and A Mind Forever Voyaging, and documents many of Infocom's successes throughout the 1980's. If reading this chapter does not compel the reader to try and play some of these digital classics, nothing will. The last few parts of this chapter examine the decline and eventual fall of Infocom and IF's mass popularity with the rise of graphical works.

Chapter six was filled with much information that I was not aware of. Montfort looks at some of the more notable international IF works, like English titles in the UK and non-English titles in Europe and around the world. This chapter was a great read. I read the entire chapter in a few hours in fact, while sitting in the White Plains airport. A great and interesting read, the pages fly by and many less notable works are examined. The thing that struck me is the amount of nuance in the descriptions of some of the foreign works. This chapter makes clear that Montfort has done his research, and his clear documentations can be found through the entire book.

The final two chapters examine the rise of the phenomenon of independent IF, and the many works that came from Independent authors like Graham Nelson and Adam Cadre. There is information about the IF competition which exists even to this day, and a look on how IF affected culture and created its own culture. Some discussion is also contained about the earlier newsgroups like rec.arts.interactive-fiction and rec.games.interactive-fiction. These chapters clearly mark IF as a very important part of computer history and culture and lends further credence to the statement that IF works are serious works of computing and art.

I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in PC gaming and IF. It is a great book and deserves a place on any geek shelf. I don't know much about Nick Montfort, but I would like to think he is a kindred geek. I hope to read more works by this author, especially if he is as passionate about other subjects as he was about IF. So hit the link to the right or up top and go to Amazon.com and buy it. It is well worth the money.

Did you remove everything in the FreeBSD /usr/local/bin ?

2007-11-26T13:01:00.001-05:00

Classic post again. This one is a boneheaded moment I had during an administration of my FreeBSD server. Since I learned from this mistake, many mistakes can be fixed on a nix based OS. Here you go.

Posted 2005-11-10

So I get an epiphany. I'll just write a script that manually deletes all of the trash out of my user's maildirs at a given time. So I was experimenting and decided to write a script that starts:

"rm -r /usr/home/*/Maildir/.Trash/cur/*"

that should do an rm -r in usr/home and the all of the users Maildir/trash/current folders.

I called it cleantrash and put it in /usr/local/bin.
I added it to the Crontab of the system to purge all trash at 3am.

Unfortunately I must have had a typo in the script. I must have written
"rm * -r /usr/home/*/Maildir/.Trash/cur/*"

because when I tested the script. I did an ls -l on /usr/local/bin

NOTHING ALL GONE

At least it isn't /usr/bin or even *gasp* /bin, but that was ALL of the binary files for all of my ports. (installed programs) Web didn't work, email didn't work...

Well just when I though all hope was lost, I figured I would rebuild portupgrade and try a portupgrade -faO.

Seemed to work at least partially. I couldn't access any of my php based hosted sites (including this one) and now I can. I HOPE this is the end of my bone-headedness. But at least with FreeBSD, almost anything can be fixed without a reimage of the whole os.

One more old post

2007-11-26T01:24:00.000-05:00

Okay, one more classic post before I got to bed. In this post, true to geek style, I am complaining about the state of affairs that I am in and lamenting the past. I was a little whinier in the past I guess.

Posted 2005-11-13

About a year ago, Some friends and I started playing a Forgotten Realms 3.5 D&D Campaign. On the first couple of days that we played, I found something. I didn't even know I'd lost it.

It started simply enough. I played with the group and after I while I was my character. That hasn't happened to me for a LONG time. To actually be in another place at another time. It made me feel like I did when I played D&D 15 years ago.

So I re-went through D&D frenzy. This is characterized by an uncontrollable urge to buy every dungeons and dragons product that has come out all at the same time.

But about halfway through a bunch of Ebay purchases for books that I just might need for some campaign or other, it hit me. Or rather my wife demanded more time. So I started canceling some games to be with her. I understand that the requirements of a husband must take precedence over everything. I don't apologize for this, nor do I regret it. But as schedules of the players changed, and the wife needing me at home more, that feeling inevitably changed. I all but stopped going to my once beloved campaign.

It's strange. We do grow up only to pine for lost feelings and things. I REALLY wanted this feeling back. Very badly. Oh, I occasionally get glimpses of it, flashes of it when I play a great Xbox game that really draws me into the story (KOTOR), or while reading a really good Star Wars book, (Dark Rendezvous) or see a great move.

When I saw LOTR, I instantly felt saturated by that feeling. And I still kind-of get it when I watch them. Its weak, but it is definitely there. And the worst part -- I don't think anyone knows exactly what I am talking about. This is no mere nostalgia. It is an indescribable feeling. It makes one feel powerful, large, important, like existence is MORE than just the normal world. This feeling often gave me hope, self confidence, and it made me happy. I hadn't had the feeling even when I played other RPGS on computer or pen an paper. It was just something about this group, this game, that brought it back.

There is one other time when I get a similar feeling. It isn't quite that same swashbuckling adventure, king-of-the-world feeling that I used to get from D&D. Whenever I play any of the Zork games, or Lucasarts or Sierra adventures, I got a different feeling. And over the past year or so most of the Zork sites, most of the "abandonware" sites have been falling slowly into decay, like the Great underground Empire itself. There have been copyright issues, publishing problems, and I'm sure most of those netizens who took it upon themselves to preserve those games and those feelings do actually have better things do do than run a Zork site. Believe me, I know.

I picked up and read through the Domains of Dread D&D Ravenloft accessory last night. Just to read through a little of it. I can tell you this, I felt as if I had put my hands into the soil and sniffed my hands and felt the faintest smell of that feeling. Like it was long gone.

I suppose this could just be youth itself that I am missing. I don't want to admit it, but at 28 years old, I am no longer able to be a child in any way, shape or form. I cannot afford it. It is very possible that this is what a mid life crisis is. If this is what getting old is going to be like, I really don't think I am going to like it that much.

So I am going to make an early new year's resolution. This next year, hell or high water, I want to try and show others that feeling. I know if I do nothing that soon, Zork will disappear. Worlds like Krynn and Ravenloft will be unheard of in the RPG community.

What will this do? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. But I will not just let these loves from my youth roll over and die. I remember my first dragon con. I must have been 13 or 14. I remember setting foot in the Atlanta Hyatt. I saw faeries and knights and samurai and basically a bunch of weird people. Standing there among the masses, I realized something. I am not alone. Other people do these things too. And it is great that someone organized an event to bring them all together to celebrate the things that I love. I want to do that. I want to bring these things that have been lost back to those people. I'm certain there are others who feel the same as me.

below is a token of beginning. There are some great netbooks here: Go get them. Read through them. And see if you can feel that feeling.
The Grave of the kargatane

And if you are curious about Zork, normally you get conflicting viewpoints of where to start.

Start here

And for the hands down most informative zork site on the web,

The chronology of quendor

Thanks,

panvamp

Here's another classic

2007-11-25T22:44:00.000-05:00

This is another classic post I did on my old blog. Its an opinion post on the state of video game emulation. If anything, it is MORE true today than when I first posted it.

Posted 2005-11-19

What happened to emulation?

I remember Back in 1996 or 7 when I first got into emulation. Retrogames was the absolute best site there was There was a new MAME release every month or so, and rom sites were all over the place... and now, despite huge advances in xbox emulation, the ENTIRE community seems to have dried up. Its like everyone who actually were interested in emu's just got bored and hung up their joysticks. Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure emu authors with that kind of challenge probably have REAL jobs, and I know that there was pressure from certain copyright groups that shut down alot of the ROM sites.

I do remember, however a certain elitism formed right about when the CPS2 Emu's started showing up. Oh, we won't allow the emulators to play any games newer than 2 years old. MAME still keeps to this as far as I can tell. And many of the authors and web admins also adopted this policy. And then it was not "kosher" to discuss these games, or compiling your own emu to play these games. Yet the dumps still existed. SOMEONE was playing these games. Come to find out, that despite their high and mighty comments, many of these authors thought that if an arcade game was older than 2 years that somehow, that was enough time for the game to be considered fair.

The problem with this thought is well documented on the abandonware site Home of the Underdogs (The underdogs). Her thought is that if the company is no longer making money off of the game, that its probably ok to post. She does not however say that it is not piracy. She makes it very clear that TECHNICALLY it violates patent law. She just says its more for posterity. The emulation community is different. They seem to think that if the magic 2 year number is up than its ok for them to download roms. I Mean who REALLY has a PCB for EVERY game that they play on an EMU? NOBODY! FACE IT, EMULATION USERS ARE PIRATES!!! I'm just not sure I get the piracy, and "only-kind-of-piracy" thing down. You're still pirates, what does it matter if you play them or not. Sure you can SAY don't play them but WTF do you have to code that into your emu's? I mean do you REALLY think that that is going to protect you from Nintendo or Sony? NO WAY.

I really think that that kind of argumentative mentality really led to a decline in the popularity of emulation. I don't see why emulation would all of a sudden just go away. Hopefully it will come back, but almost every emu site I know of are never updated anymore.

Maybe the internet itself is just dying.

Depressing.

Classic Posts

2007-11-25T20:48:00.000-05:00

For about 3 years I blogged on my own server. Of course, nobody at all read any of my posts. But since I started this new one I figure I'll try to post some of my better posts. I call these classic posts.
Posted 2005-12-21

Geez. I have just been working and surfing, and I have a new gripe to talk about.

I have always gotten along with people, and I like to think that I am well liked. I can have a decent conversation with pretty much everybody I meet; black, brown, women, men doesn't matter. But, since High school, I have never really "fit in". It bothers me in a way, I mean I like lots of people and lots of people like me, but I am not like anyone else. I have some kinships, friendships, but about the only person that even comes close is my wife. However, even she has some major differences from me.

When the internet first started I started feeling kinships with other gamers and geeks, A like minded people that just fit together. But even that, now that everyone and their mother is on the "interweb", is starting to fail me. The blatant rampant liberalism, Marxism, communism of all the people on the web is appalling. The fact that most people speak about blogging, email and p2p like they actually have some idea of how it works (they don't) sickens me. Now grandma to little johnny is out there all over the internet, and alot of people are just begging the FCC or the UN to come in and take over, so that they can feel safe "on-line". This is not me.

I respect works like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Even now, after their large popularity and so-called "geek chic" B.S, these things are still used as a punchline. AD&D, which I am CONVINCED that the large majority of people just do not understand, is another good example. Before saying that you played RPG's was almost expected. But now, you post anything about it and OOOPS, you're just a geek again.

Sometimes I just feel lost. I am seen by most people as an impossible dichotomy of contradictions. I'm Libertarian. That means that every single liberal I talk to thinks I'm a right-wing wacko, and every conservative I talk to thinks I'm a pinko. I'm against organized religion, but I actively encourage personal religious experiences. That means that I am lost among atheists, but I am also lost among religious zealots. I am a gun owner who does not support the NRA's policies of protecting hunters tooth and nail but being "not-so-vocal" when the stupid assault weapons ban came around.

I just don't know what to do. I feel alone sometimes. I'm a happy person and I like who I am. It's just sometimes I feel like a misift. I guess that happens to everyone... And I know that everyone thinks that they are the worst misfit of them all.

I REALLY want to move somewhere where I can be myself. And with other people that are like me. If only I could live on Summerisle, like in The Wicker Man (sans the Christian burning thing).
It makes me wonder If I am actually capable of building such a place somewhere where we would not be bothered with any laws but our own... and then I wonder if I could actually fill an island with people like me...

Well, If I don't post before then, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and the like.
panvamp